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Cultural Identity, Soap Narrative, and Reality TV

University of Queensland

This article works from the established assumption that narratives produced for local audiences are always going to operate in some relation to established discourses of local or national cultural identities. In the case of Australian television soap opera, this is not in any way a radical assumption, given the format’s routine construction of a recognizable version of the local-everyday as the ground on which its narratives are staged. In this article, the author argues that it is likely, in the case of certain versions of reality TV that draw on the soap opera format for their narrative and formal structures, that reality TV’s representations of the real and the everyday are going to operate similarly—indigenizing even the most international of formats and genres. Thus, the way to examine "the local" in the "global" may well be through mapping processes of appropriation and adaptation rather than through the proposition of any thoroughgoing specificity or uniqueness.

Key Words: TV soap opera • television formats • the local • national identity

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